Gilded Age

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Gilded Age of United States history ran from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, and one of its statistics is hard to forget. An average white ten-year-old American boy in 1880 could expect to die at age forty-eight. He would stand 5 feet, 5 inches tall. That made him shorter, and shorter-lived, than his Revolutionary forebears. Yet he lived in a country with sewing machines and phonographs, a country where fortunes were piling up in plain view. Poverty was just as visible, especially in the South.

  How does a nation grow so rich while its people grow shorter and die younger? Who gathered the new wealth, and who paid for it in sweat and risk? And why did later historians take the era's name from a satirical novel instead of inventing one of their own?

  3446635

• 2. A Borrowed Name

  ›

  Mark Twain published a novel in 1873 called The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, and it ranks among his lesser-known books. He wrote it with Charles Dudley Warner. The story mocked the golden age that Americans had been promised after the Civil War. It pictured a country whose serious social problems were hidden beneath a thin gold gilding of economic expansion.

  The label was attached to the real era decades later, by historians of the 1920s. In the 1920s and 1930s the metaphor spread to literary and cultural critics too. Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Charles Austin Beard, Mary Ritter Beard, Vernon Louis Parrington, and Matthew Josephson all used it. For them it was an insult, aimed at a time of materialistic excess and widespread political corruption.

  Historians cannot agree on a start date. Some choose 1865, when the Civil War ended, others 1873, and others 1877, when Reconstruction ended. Abroad, the early half of the era roughly matched the middle of the Victorian era in Britain and the Belle Époque in France. The end date is just as slippery. Most point to the start of the Progressive Era in the 1890s, and some to the presidential election of 1896.

  349563

• 3. The Railroad Age

  ›

  In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad opened, joining the Union Pacific, from Omaha to Utah, to the Central Pacific, from Utah to California. A trip from New York to San Francisco shrank from six months to six days. Track mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, then doubled again by 1920. The new lines tied isolated regions to large markets. Together they formed a single market practically the size of Europe's, with no internal tariffs or language barriers and a common financial and legal system behind it.

  In 1860 the combined shares and bonds of American railroad companies came to $1.8 billion. By 1897 that total had reached $10.6 billion, while the national debt stood at $1.2 billion. Laying track cost far more than building factories, so railroads drove the growth of private finance. Most of the money came from investors in the Northeast and from Europe, especially Britain. About 10 percent came from the federal government, mostly as land grants. British investment reached about $3 billion by 1914, and from 1914-1917 Britain sold its American holdings to pay for war supplies.

  Historian Henry Adams wrote that "The generation from 1865 to 1895 was already mortgaged to the railways, and no one knew it better than the generation itself." The Western Railroad of Massachusetts and the Baltimore and Ohio led in management in the 1840s, followed by the Erie in the 1850s and the Pennsylvania in the 1860s. Their systems had to handle far more simultaneous relationships than a factory owner who could walk his whole shop in a few hours. Civil engineers rose to become senior management.

  Railroads also invented the career path. A young man hired at age 18 as a shop laborer could be a skilled mechanic at 24, a brakeman at 25, and a freight conductor at 27. A passenger conductor's post came at 57. Women were rarely hired. Pay and promotion were set by central administrators rather than foremen, to cut favoritism and personality conflicts. By the 1880s the first career railroaders were retiring, and pension systems were invented to provide for them.

  Crowds put on their Sunday best to go down to the terminal and watch the train come in. Historians Gary Cross and Rick Szostak argue that the freedom to travel brought a greater sense of national identity and less regional cultural diversity. There was a dark side too. By the 1870s Western farmers had absorbed the Granger movement's argument that monopolistic carriers held too much pricing power. Some "Granger Laws" capping prices were passed. Collis P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, dominated California's economy and politics, and became one of the most hated railroad men in the country. He defended himself this way: "The motives back of my actions have been honest ones and the results have redounded far more to the benefit of California than they have to my own."

  Chicago became the main railroad center, and its meat packers show the system at work. Shipping live animals was slow and expensive, so packers in Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati slaughtered them and shipped dressed meat in refrigerated freight cars. Historian William Cronon concludes that ranchers in Wyoming and feedlot farmers in Iowa gained a reliable market, while Americans of all classes found more variety of meat at lower prices. The cars were cooled by slabs of ice harvested from northern lakes in winter and stored for summer and fall.

  1015202938

• 4. Inventors and Trusts

  ›

  From 1860 to 1890, 500,000 patents were issued in the United States, more than ten times the number granted in the previous 70 years. Steel production rose to pass the combined totals of Britain, Germany, and France. From 1865 to 1898, coal output rose 800 percent, wheat 256 percent, and corn 222 percent.

  George Westinghouse invented air brakes that made trains both safer and faster. Theodore Vail established the American Telephone & Telegraph Company and built a great communications network. Elisha Otis developed the elevator, which made skyscrapers possible and packed more people into city centers. In Chicago, the ten-story Home Insurance Building, designed by William Le Baron Jenney and built in 1884-1885, began a skyscraper craze. Thomas Edison invented hundreds of devices and also founded the first electrical lighting utility, built on direct current and an efficient incandescent lamp. Streets were lit at night, and electric streetcars made commuting and shopping faster.

  The Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s launched the petroleum industry, and the United States dominated it into the 1950s. Kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting homes. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company and monopolized the business. It mostly produced kerosene until the automobile created a demand for gasoline in the 20th century.

  By 1900, a few large corporations called trusts dominated steel, oil, sugar, meat, and farm machinery. Through vertical integration, a trust controlled every stage of making a good, which maximized profit on the finished product and minimized prices. Controlling raw materials kept rivals out. Monopolies such as Standard Oil kept prices low whenever a competitor appeared, and they grew four times faster than the competitive sectors. Inside the factories, Frederick Winslow Taylor observed that steel workers could be far more efficient if close stopwatch observation removed wasted effort. Mechanization turned some factories into collections of unskilled laborers doing simple, repetitive tasks under skilled foremen and engineers.

  Critics called the wealthy industrialists and financiers robber barons, and argued that their fortunes came from chicanery, at the expense of workers and democracy. Admirers called them captains of industry. Andrew Carnegie donated over 90% of his wealth and said that philanthropy was the duty of the rich, a view known as The Gospel of Wealth. John D. Rockefeller gave over $500 million to charities, more than half his net worth. Private money endowed thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, and charities. Many business leaders also followed Herbert Spencer's theory of social Darwinism, which justified laissez-faire capitalism, competition, and social stratification.

  By 1914 per capita income in the United States stood at $377, against $244 in Britain, $184 in Germany, $153 in France, and $108 in Italy. Russia and Japan trailed far behind at $41 and $36. London still remained the financial center of the world until 1914. In 1901 the British author W. T. Stead asked what many foreigners were wondering: "What is the secret of American success?"

  1213194441

• 5. Wages and Want

  ›

  The Census Bureau reported in 1892 that the average annual wage per industrial worker, counting men, women, and children, rose from $380 in 1880 to $564 in 1890. That was a gain of 48%. Economic historian Clarence D. Long estimated, in constant 1914 dollars, that the average yearly income of non-farm employees rose from $375 in 1870 to $573 in 1900, a gain of 53% in 30 years.

  Australian historian Peter Shergold compared Pittsburgh with Birmingham, one of the richest industrial cities of Europe. The cost of living was 65% higher in the American city, so unskilled workers lived about equally well in both. Skilled workers in Pittsburgh had a standard of living 50% to 100% higher than their counterparts in Birmingham. Warren B. Catlin proposed that America's natural resources and virgin land acted as a safety valve for poorer workers, forcing employers to pay more. Historian Steve Fraser paints a darker picture. In his account workers generally earned less than $800 per year, for roughly 60 hours of work a week.

  The working-class press condemned wage labor as "wage slavery". In 1886 economist Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, put it bluntly: "Chattel slavery is dead, but industrial slavery remains."

  From 1860 to 1900, the wealthiest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the nation's wealth, and the top 10% owned roughly three-quarters. The bottom 40% had no wealth at all. Economist Richard Sutch offers an alternative view. In his numbers the bottom 25% owned 0.32% of the wealth and the top 0.1% owned 9.4%, which would make this the lowest wealth gap in recorded history. He credits the lack of government interference.

  In 1889 the railroads employed 704,000 men, of whom 20,000 were injured and 1,972 were killed on the job. American industry had the highest rate of accidents in the world. The United States was also the only industrial power with no workers' compensation program.

  In New York, the poorest crowded into low-cost housing in neighborhoods such as Five Points and Hell's Kitchen. Overcrowding spread germs, and death rates in big-city tenements vastly exceeded those in the countryside. Rural death rates began to improve after 1870, but urban rates did not improve until the 1890s. Tuberculosis gave way to water-borne and insect-borne diseases such as malaria and cholera by the end of the century. Infant mortality was so high that a person who reached twenty had, on average, more years left than a newborn baby did.

  Sanitary reforms sometimes backfired. Removing pigs from cities left trash piling up in streets where the animals could no longer scavenge. Sewers built for the flush toilets of upper and middle-class homes polluted waterways and ended urban fisheries, which had been a major source of nutrition for the urban poor.

  5253545964

• 6. Strikes and Unions

  ›

  Carpenters, printers, shoemakers, and cigar makers formed craft unions that grew steadily in the industrial cities after 1870. They relied on frequent short strikes to control the labor market and fend off rival unions. They generally blocked women, blacks, and Chinese from membership but welcomed most European immigrants. The railroads had their own separate unions.

  The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 involved an estimated 80,000 railroad workers and several hundred thousand other Americans, employed and unemployed. Historian Jack Beatty called it "the largest strike anywhere in the world in the 19th century." It broke out during the depression of the 1870s, and it was not a union action. It was a series of uncoordinated outbursts in many cities. The strike and its riots lasted 45 days. Several hundred participants died, though no police or soldiers did, and millions of dollars of railroad property was damaged. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in federal troops.

  The Knights of Labor, which began growing in the mid-1880s, grew too fast and failed to handle the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886. The Knights avoided violence, but their reputation collapsed after the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago that same year. Anarchists allegedly bombed policemen who were dispersing a meeting, and police then fired into the crowd. Seven anarchists went on trial and four were hanged, even though no evidence directly linked them to the bombing. At its peak the Knights claimed 700,000 members. By 1890 membership had fallen below 100,000, and the order faded away.

  There were 37,000 strikes from 1881 to 1905, most of them very short. The building trades had the largest number, followed by coal miners. In the 1880s American workers struck at three times the rate of workers in France. Strikes were more violent but less successful in depressions, because the company was losing money anyway. In prosperous times, firms wanted to settle quickly to protect profits.

  The 1894 Pullman Strike was the largest and most dramatic, a coordinated effort to shut down the national railroad system. It was led by the upstart American Railway Union under Eugene V. Debs, without the support of the established brotherhoods. The union defied federal court orders to stop blocking mail trains, so President Grover Cleveland used the U.S. Army to get the trains moving. The American Railway Union vanished. The traditional brotherhoods survived but avoided strikes.

  The American Federation of Labor, headed by Samuel Gompers, found a different path. It was a coalition of unions, each built on strong local chapters, and it coordinated their work in cities to prevent jurisdictional battles. Gompers repudiated socialism and abandoned the violent ways of the earlier unions. The AFL worked to control the local labor market, which won its locals higher wages and more say in hiring. Its unions spread to most cities and reached peak membership in 1919.

  6970737677

• 7. Machines and Ballots

  ›

  From 1872 to 1900, average presidential turnout was 83% in the North and 62% in the South, and in some Northern states it topped 80% or even 90%. Only men could vote. Two parties of nearly equal strength fought elections so close that a slight nudge could tip them either way. Nationwide, turnout fell sharply after 1900. Yet historians find few real policy differences between the Democrats and Republicans of the time, and they are somewhat infamous for doing very little of importance in office.

  Tammany Hall in New York City, led by Democrat Boss Tweed, was the largest and most notorious political machine. Machines paid off supporters with the spoils system, handing out government jobs and contracts in exchange for votes. Corruption was so commonplace that in 1868 the New York state legislature legalized such bribery. Historian Mark Wahlgren Summers calls the period "The Era of Good Stealings", pointing to padded expenses, lucrative contracts, outright embezzlements, and illegal bond issues. He adds that corruption influenced a few decisions but rarely determined one.

  Former President Ulysses S. Grant became the most famous victim of con-men. He trusted Ferdinand Ward most, and was cheated out of all his money. Friends bought his personal assets and let him keep using them. The Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872 reached into Congress. The corruption split the Republican Party into the Stalwarts, led by Roscoe Conkling, and the Half-Breeds, led by James G. Blaine.

  Reformers called for civil service reform. They were led by the Bourbon Democrats and the Republican Mugwumps, and their support elected Democrat Cleveland in 1884. That was the first national Democratic victory since 1856. The Bourbon Democrats wanted low tariffs, low taxes, and hands-off government. Republicans insisted that high tariffs protected industries that paid high wages. The presidents of the period, with the exception of Cleveland, are collectively remembered as the "forgettable presidents".

  Religion often decided how a Northern voter cast a ballot. Republicans exploited the Democrats' association with "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion". Rum meant liquor interests, Romanism meant Roman Catholics, especially Irish Americans, and Rebellion meant the Confederacy and its Northern allies, the Copperheads. About 50% of Northern voters were pietistic Protestants who wanted government to curb social sins such as drinking, and they backed the GOP. Catholics, Episcopalians, and German Lutherans saw the Democrats as protection against prohibition. In Wisconsin, Republicans tried to close German-language parochial schools and were defeated in 1890 when the Bennett Law was put to the test.

  In the courts, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field's dissent in the Slaughter-House Cases became the predominant view in judicial thinking in the later decades of the Gilded Age. Judges influenced by classical liberalism used the 14th Amendment to strike down a broad range of state regulations. They treated freedom of contract, open competition, and laissez-faire as part of the Constitution. Between 1880 and 1900 they invalidated more than 60 labor laws.

  8397969980

• 8. Newcomers and Frontiers

  ›

  About 20 million immigrants came to the United States during the Gilded Age, in what is known as the new immigration. Some were prosperous farmers with cash to buy land and tools, especially in the Plains states. Many were poor peasants looking for the American Dream in unskilled work in mills, mines, and factories. Few went to the poverty-stricken South. In 1892 the federal government opened a reception center on Ellis Island, near the Statue of Liberty, where new arrivals had to pass a medical inspection.

  Irish Catholics had arrived in large numbers in the 1840s and 1850s, after the great famine in Ireland. By the late 19th century they had a strong "lace curtain" middle class, typified by P. J. Kennedy in Boston. After 1880 the old immigration from Germany, Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia slackened. Newcomers from Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece, and French Canada filled the new unskilled jobs, and this new immigration peaked about 1910. Many Italians and Greeks planned to return to their home villages with a nest egg. Many Jews had been driven out of Eastern Europe and had no intention of returning. Historians describe push factors, such as land shortages and antisemitism, and pull factors, such as cheap farmland and factory jobs.

  In the 1870 census there were 63,000 Chinese men, with a few women, in the entire country. By 1880 the number had grown to 106,000. Chinese laborers did most of the work on the Central Pacific Railroad from California to Utah. European Americans disliked them for their alien lifestyles and the threat of low wages, and unions led by Samuel Gompers opposed them. Congress banned Chinese laborers through the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, though some students and businessmen were let in temporarily. Chinese immigrants could not become citizens until 1950, but under United States v. Wong Kim Ark their children born in the U.S. were full citizens. By 1940 the Chinese population had fallen to 37,000.

  The number of farms tripled from 2.0 million in 1860 to 6.0 million in 1905. The Homestead Act of 1862 issued 160 acre tracts virtually free to settlers, and the railroads sold land cheaply and advertised heavily in Europe. The frontier had virtually ended by 1890. The farther west the settlers went, the more they depended on monopolistic railroads, and the more inclined they were to protest. The Grange movement was launched in 1867 by employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to counter the isolation of farm families. Spurred by the Panic of 1873, it grew to 20,000 chapters and 1.5 million members, though most of its cooperative ventures went bankrupt. The Populist movement won 44 votes in the Electoral College in 1892. Its high point came in 1896 with the Democratic candidacy of William Jennings Bryan, who was sympathetic to populist concerns such as the silver standard.

  Settlers killed American bison by the millions. The animals were the foundation of the economy of the Great Plains peoples, so their near-extinction in the 1880s had a severe impact. After 1865, national policy told Native Americans to assimilate or live on reservations, where the government provided subsidies.

  In the South, sharecropping became the dominant system after the Civil War. About 80% of Black farmers and 40% of White farmers lived under it, and most sharecroppers were locked in a cycle of debt. In the Compromise of 1877, President Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South, and White Democrats known as Redeemers quickly reversed the advances of Reconstruction. Black political power was eliminated in the 1880s. In the 1890s new laws blocked over 90% of Black people from voting. Jim Crow laws, which mandated legal segregation, stayed in effect until Congress abolished them in 1964.

  63673546100